I Know It’s Delta’s World and I Just Fly In It But….

Delta made a little tweak to Delta.com sometime in the last month or so that I had not picked up on until a week ago. I book my personal flights via Delta.com, hit purchase, and the flight tickets. Life goes on. However, my day job requires me to use a corporate travel agent. I book via our travel planning website, then go to Delta.com and assign myself seats I want. Recently, I went through this exercise and when I attempted to assign myself an exit row seat I got a big screen of the following:

Do what? I tried again. Same message. In fact, I tried just about every single preferred seat on the airplane…same deal. Fortunately, I was automatically assigned a preferred seat, but I could not change to a different one. A quick chat with the great folks at @DeltaAssist and I learned something new.

Well, that’s mildly annoying because my business flights do not ticket until three business days prior to departure. Perhaps my business travel advanced ticketing rules only cover a limited subset of travelers (likely), and Delta feels like it is protecting seats for preferred fliers? The requirement to be ticketed has always applied to Economy Comfort seats, but this is the first time it has prevented me from selecting an exit row or other preferred seat. Anyone else notice this, or did I just miss the memo?

Marshall Jackson is an aviation enthusiast and avid cruiser. After 10 years in the airline business, Marshall moved on to a new career that includes plenty of travel and plenty of cruises, and that’s just the way he likes it.

Marshall- I have had success in getting the Carlson-Wagonlit to issue my tickets earlier than three days, but you have to pick your times to do this as they will not do it routinely. Tell them that you need it ticketed earlier due to operational reasons. They just want to make sure that you are not going to change plans and cause a change fee.

I noticed this as well since at least 2 months ago. But there is a workaround! The Delta mobile app does not enforce this restriction. You can even pick the green seats for an un-ticketed flight. Let’s hope they do not close this loophole.

3 day in advance for ticketing for a Corporate Ticket? Really? My company will only hold a reservation for 24 hours for auto cancelling and requires reservations be tickets more than 7 days in advance.